First of all, under the background of epidemic prevention and control in COVID-19, the pattern of scientific community has changed dramatically. Scientists in almost all fields turned to the track, quit their jobs and went to study COVID-19.
For example, Jennifer Doudna, a Nobel Prize winner engaged in CRISPR gene editing, stopped working as a whole team when the epidemic began to spread rapidly in the United States last March, and turned her energy to study COVID-19. They tried to develop a COVID-19 detection method by using CRISPR gene editing technology. At that time, because of the shortage of testing reagents in COVID-19, Jennifer also transformed her laboratory into a testing center in COVID-19 to do testing for local people.
For another example, some physicists also ran to build models to simulate the spread trend of viruses, and some immunologists who originally studied bacteria turned to study viruses. Scientists who used to study olfactory nerves also came to study why some infected people in COVID-19 lost their sense of smell. This eventually led to an explosive result. Since the outbreak of Xinguan, the amount of COVID-19-related papers in PubMed has reached as high as 9W+. What is this concept? This figure is more than twice the sum of papers related to infectious diseases such as cholera and measles! And these infectious diseases have existed for hundreds of years!
In addition, this situation that all walks of life focus on one direction has also promoted the progress of another dimension in academic circles, that is, the new cooperation mechanism has greatly improved the efficiency of knowledge popularization. Because COVID-19 is an urgent public event, if it is published through the traditional periodical review mechanism, many research results will be left out in the cold. Therefore, researchers began to become popular in the habit of publishing papers on pre-printed platforms such as BioRxiv, medRxiv and arXiv. Take medRxiv as an example. At the beginning of 2020n, there were only about 1 0,000 preprints on this platform. By 10 month, this number has soared to 1.2W+.
Moreover, this pre-printed platform is basically free, and anyone can "Bai Piao" for free (I have many of them myself ...), which greatly accelerates the enjoyment and popularization of the latest research results to a certain extent. Because of this situation, some research teams have done some research, and they found that papers related to COVID-19 are more likely to be published by researchers who have never cooperated before [2].
Of course, this phenomenon is not without its shortcomings. For example, uncensored research results may be wrong, which may lead to misleading. For example, in last year's n3, two biogeographers published a preprint on the Internet, predicting that COVID-19 would have a slight impact on tropical areas, because the virus is not easy to survive in warm and humid conditions. But obviously, the epidemic in Brazil has reached this conclusion face to face, but at that time, this result caused great concern, not only by more than 50 news media, but also by the United Nations World Food Program [3].
Therefore, we can't say whether the problem is getting faster or slower. Everything has two sides, and different people have different views. I can only say that the COVID-19 epidemic has made the scientific community realize some new modes of cooperation and development, which is undoubtedly a good thing at this level.